


Ms. Cooper Builds Her Dream House

by stillscape



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, author!betty, carpenter!jug, home renovation AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 13:29:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19992991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: The house that stole Betty’s heart was on the outskirts of town, not terribly far from the old, abandoned Blossom estate. It was a farmhouse. It sat on five beautiful wooded acres. There was an overgrown rose garden that remained beautiful, even through the mess of weeds that entangled it. A creek ran through the backyard. Right now—late July—it was overwhelmingly green and lush. In winter, covered in snow, it would be equally picturesque.Or, four times Betty Cooper regretted buying a fixer-upper and one time she didn't.





	Ms. Cooper Builds Her Dream House

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EarthLaughsInFlowers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EarthLaughsInFlowers/gifts).



> Happy birthday to the delightful earthlaughsinflowers!

  
  
  
  


**01.**

The “S” on the side of Fred Andrews’ old truck—A & S Construction—stood for “Son.” Andrews and Son Construction. Betty was sure of this. She’d grown up next door to the Andrews family, after all. She’d spent a dozen idyllic childhood summers traipsing through the woods with that very son, and one miserable year in high school fantasizing about doing other, more adult things with him. She knew that Artie Andrews added the “Son” when Fred joined the business, and she knew that when Fred inherited the company, he’d left the “Son” in the hopes that Archie would one day join him. 

Archie’s dreams led him out of Riverdale, and so did Betty’s. They’d lost touch in the dozen years since their high school graduation. 

Betty’s dreams led her out of Riverdale; cheap real estate prices brought her back. After all, she could write from anywhere. She might as well write from a house she could truly call her own. 

She looked at a cookie-cutter two-story in a relatively new subdivision, a converted storefront apartment in what passed for downtown, a small ranch house located only half a block from where she’d grown up and her parents still lived. 

(“What were you thinking, Ethel?” she’d hissed at her real estate agent, after Betty’s mother strode, uninvited, into the middle of the newly upgraded kitchen and criticized the choice of backsplash tile. “There’s no way in hell I can live this close to my parents.”)

The house that stole Betty’s heart was on the outskirts of town, not terribly far from the old, abandoned Blossom estate. It was a farmhouse. It sat on five beautiful wooded acres. There was an overgrown rose garden that remained beautiful, even through the mess of weeds that entangled it. A creek ran through the backyard. Right now—late July—it was overwhelmingly green and lush. In winter, covered in snow, it would be equally picturesque. 

Even before she set foot inside, Betty felt that this was a house in which she could _really write_. 

The house had also been uninhabited for the last several years. 

“It needs a lot of work,” Ethel warned her, a message driven home by the many broken windows downstairs, the faint mildew odor emanating from the carpet that covered the staircase, and the family of raccoons that screeched loudly from the tub when they entered the master bathroom. 

Miraculously, neither of them twisted an ankle on their very rapid retreat down the stairs. 

Ethel, hand over her still-heaving heart, said, “I have a few options for you in Greendale.” 

“No,” Betty said, shaking her head so she got a pleasingly emphatic swish of the ponytail. Broken windows could be replaced, after all. Raccoons could be relocated. And the carpet… 

She knelt down now, and peeled back a corner of the mystery-colored carpet. It wasn’t attached very solidly. 

“See?” Triumph welled in Betty’s chest. This house was the one, she just knew it. “Hardwood underneath.” 

The owners were more than delighted to have an offer, any offer. Betty got the house for a song. 

Movers carried in her furniture one day, and Betty unpacked the rest of her modest possessions herself. She couldn’t resist singing out loud as she carried everything in from the U-Haul, piling most of it in the living room for now. This place was _hers_ , all hers. Fred Andrews was more than up to the task of transforming the space into the farmhouse of her dreams, and today he would be coming by to do his initial assessments. She only had to be patient. 

Alone in the woods, with a white bandana tied around her ponytail, she felt like the best kind of liberated, postfeminist Disney princess. 

The old truck rambled up her driveway right on time, and Betty’s heart swelled. Though the paint job seemed fresh, it was a balm to her soul, the knowledge that Fred stubbornly refused to upgrade to a newer vehicle. 

“My fairy godfather,” she called, practically skipping down the walkway from the front door to the driveway. This turned out to be a mistake. There was a huge crack in the concrete path, and she tripped over it, landing hard and skinning her knee. 

“You okay?” 

The voice was not Fred’s. Nor was the hand that extended into her line of sight. This was a much younger man’s hand, with long fingers and a big silver ring on the middle one. Several beaded leather bracelets were wrapped around the wrist. Further up, she saw the rolled-up sleeve of a well-worn flannel shirt across his forearm. The flannel shirt hung, unbuttoned, over a white tank top. 

Betty stood up entirely on her own. “Fine,” she said. “Just fine.” 

The man who was not Fred Andrews gave her a funny look. “Your knee’s bleeding.” 

“It’s fine,” she said shortly. “Sorry, who are you? Where’s Fred?” 

“Fred’s not handling small projects like this one anymore. He’s supervising a build over in Centerville.” He stuck the hand back out, and she shook it. Both of them seemed to regret this contact. “Jughead Jones.” 

“Betty Cooper,” she said. “What kind of a name is ‘Jughead’?”

“A nickname. Real thing’s worse. So, Betty, what—”

The mystery novels of E. Coopersmith—the pen name she’d always used—were often praised for their attention to detail. No other note in a review filled Betty with such a warm glow. But it didn’t take an E. Coopersmith to note that Fred’s new paint job was _weird_. 

“Why is the S on the truck a snake now?” she asked, scowling at it. “That looks exactly like the old Southside Serpents logo.” 

Jughead Jones folded two arms and one clipboard across his chest. “You have a problem with that?” 

“The Serpents are a _gang_. They deal drugs. What’s their logo doing on Fred’s truck?” 

“The Serpents _were_ a gang,” Jughead countered. “We’re not anymore. No one deals drugs.” 

Now Betty folded her arms across _her_ chest. “You’re a Serpent?” 

For a long, intense moment, Jughead Jones stared down Betty Cooper. His eyes were blue and unblinking. The displeased expression made his face seem especially pointy. 

He threw his clipboard on the ground and shrugged off the flannel shirt. On his right bicep, Jughead bore a large, shiny scar. On his left was the Southside Serpents logo, inked in black and green, with a twist. The snake wore a tiny gold crown that was vaguely reminiscent of the gray beanie on Jughead’s head, which had a weirdly pointy brim. 

“I’m the leader of the Serpents,” he said shortly. “I’m also an honest contractor. Believe it or don’t, but Fred Andrews trusts me, so.” He picked the clipboard back up. “Shall we take a look at the mess you’ve gotten yourself into?” 

With a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, Betty realized the “S” in “A & S Construction” now stood not for “son,” but for “Serpents.”

  
  
  
  


**02.**

Betty wasn’t sure how she was supposed to write through renovations. This wouldn’t have been a problem if Fred Andrews was supervising said renovations. She trusted Fred both implicitly and explicitly. She could have left the construction zone and gone to a coffee shop, a library, Pop’s. She could have gone _anywhere_. But Fred had sent a literal gang to fix her house, and she didn’t personally know any of them. It seemed imperative that she stay on site, just in case. 

Her home inspector had said—and Jughead concurred—that _everything_ needed to be done. She wondered how long _everything_ would take. Jughead’s estimate was four weeks. This estimate seemed optimistic to her. 

It was a million degrees out today. The air conditioning sort of worked. But the room she was using as an office had four windows, and all of them were broken, so there was really no point in trying to turn it on. She had three box fans pointed at her desk, all plugged into extension cords. The whirring was loud, but not loud enough to block out the sound of an entire construction crew ripping out every last scrap of drywall from the upstairs. 

She was staring out one of the broken windows, trying to think, when she heard a loud _screech_. A furry, gray blur launched itself past her window and landed already running into the woods. 

“One down, five to go!” called a voice. There was a roar of laughter, and another screech. A second raccoon flew past Betty’s window. 

“For god’s sake, Sweet Pea!” she heard Jughead yell. “Stop terrorizing those things. I told you to get Animal Control in here.” 

Betty turned back to her laptop, realized she had typed the word “raccoon” instead of “raconteur” several times, and began tapping the backspace key with her index finger. 

On her third tap, there was a loud, sizzling pop as all the fuses in the house shorted out.

  
  
  
  


**03.**

“You know, you’re doing that wrong.” 

Betty looked up from her gardening, which was not going well. They were two weeks into the renovations now. The raccoons had been relocated, the windows replaced, and the fuse box repaired. The mildewed carpet was gone, revealing a staircase in such desperate shape that Jughead had forbidden Betty, or anyone else, to put weight on it. She was taking out her frustrations on the rose garden. Despite her thick leather gloves, sunscreen, straw hat, and bug spray, she suspected the rose garden was taking its frustrations out on her, too. 

“You know, the staircase held Sweet Pea just fine, and he’s nine feet tall,” Betty countered. “If I stick to the edges, I’m sure it’ll be fine. I won’t fall through.” 

“You won’t fall through because you won’t go up it,” Jughead replied. 

“I want to sleep in my own bed, Jughead. Not on an air mattress in the living room.” 

He sighed. “Look. I’m sorry, again, that I walked in on you this morning. But again, in my defense, the air mattress was in the _office_ when I went home last night—” 

“Well, the air conditioning broke, and the living room has a better cross-breeze!”

“—and I had absolutely no way of knowing you sleep nude,” Jughead finished. 

Betty automatically folded her arms over the bib of her overalls. Now there were four layers between her nipples and Jughead Jones: arms, denim, t-shirt, bra. Jughead had only one layer over his: the white tank top. He was sweaty, of course. It clung. She found she was not _entirely_ opposed to the sight. 

“I don’t,” she said stiffly. “Except when it’s ninety degrees inside at night. Now, don’t you have work to be getting back to? Or did you need to further criticize my gardening skills?” 

“I—” 

“What do you even know about gardening, anyway? Pardon my presumption, but you don’t seem like the type.” 

“What, you think that just because I grew up in a trailer park and have a gang tattoo, I can’t know anything about roses?” 

Betty felt herself flush as pink as the pink roses, not from heat but from embarrassment. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she muttered. 

“I do _home renovations_ for a living, Ms. Cooper. I’m in fairly regular contact with professional landscapers. So I do know that you’re not supposed to just hack away at the rose bushes, yes.”

Betty flushed pinker. 

“But what I actually came out here to tell you was that Fangs just whipped up a batch of his famous lemonade,” he said. “There’s a big cooler inside the kitchen. You’re welcome to have some, if you want.” 

Since the entire house was currently without electricity, and therefore refrigeration, Betty accepted. As she sipped, she looked up “rose pruning” on her phone, and realized she had in fact been doing it incorrectly.

  
  
  
  


**04.**

Despite her concerns about the trustworthiness of...well, a gang of former and possibly current gang members, only one category of Betty’s personal possessions had been unnecessarily disturbed during the renovations. These were the copies of her own novels, which kept disappearing from the sole assembled bookshelf in her house, only to reappear a day or two later looking ever-so-slightly worse for wear. 

Finally, a month in, she caught the culprit. 

“Oh, ho,” she said, sloshing across the kitchen floor in her pink polka-dot rain boots. “Six inches of standing water, and here you are, sitting around with a book.” _My book_. The thought sent a pleasing tingle through her insides. 

Jughead looked up, raising his eyebrows over the book’s edge. He was sitting on her kitchen counter, long legs folded at the ankle as he leaned against a cabinet. “One, I’m on my federally-mandated lunch break. Two, even if I weren’t, I’m supervising the pump.” He gestured at the hose running from the middle of her kitchen floor out the window to the middle of her lawn, where it was depositing water into a patch that was already muddy from last night’s thunderstorm, then stuck his hand back into the bag of animal crackers he’d been munching on. 

“Uh-huh.” She joined him, in a manner of speaking, popping up onto the kitchen island across from him. “So you’re the one who’s been borrowing all my Coopersmith novels?” 

“Guilty as charged,” he sighed, looking just the tiniest bit abashed. “I swear, the Riverdale library hasn’t updated its mystery holdings since I was in high school.” 

“Wait. The library doesn’t have _any_ Coopersmith?” She would have to remedy that. It was her hometown, for crying out loud, even if her alias had never disclosed where she grew up. 

“Just the one she published while she _was_ in high school,” Jughead replied. “I’ve picked up a lot of them on my own, but you seem to have everything she’s ever written.” 

“I do,” she said. 

“You could be president of her fan club.” He chuckled. “And I thought I had it bad.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah.” He seemed to be considering whether or not he regretted having divulged even that much. 

“Do tell, Mr. Jones.” 

“Don’t hold it against me,” he said, a boyish, embarrassed sort of smile wavering on his face. “But all through high school and college, I had a pretty big crush on her.” 

Though part of Betty wondered how long she might be able to keep up the ruse before Jughead put two and two together she decided against trying to do so. Jughead was pretty smart, she’d come to realize, and she would feel bad about fooling him. 

The moment was too good not to milk at least a little bit, though. Betty arranged her face into a perplexed sort of frown.

“But there are no known published pictures of her,” she said. “You had no idea what you were getting into.”

He shrugged. “I had a crush on her _writing_. And all the articles described her as pretty.”

“That’s not much to go on, Jughead.” 

“She was an enigma with an amazing command of detail. That was good enough for me at the time.”

“Well,” she said, grinning slyly, “let me know if you still like her enough to want an autograph. I have a pretty close connection to the author.” 

Jughead went pale. 

“In fact,” she continued, “I think you already have it on quite a few pieces of paper...estimates and what-have-you…” 

Groaning loudly, Jughead dragged the ever-present beanie from his head and pulled it over his face. Betty had to bite her lip to keep from laughing at him. 

Later that night, as she lay on her air mattress, she reread her very first novel for the first time in years. The story—a reimagining of her sister’s relationship with a boyfriend Betty so disliked that she fictionally murdered him—was rather amateurish, and the writing even more so. But it did contain many details. 

She wondered what Jughead had been like in high school. He might have thought she was an enigma, but as she mulled over the idea of a teen gang member having a crush on who she’d been at seventeen, she couldn’t help but think that Jughead might be just as complicated as she was.

  
  
  
  


**05.**

“That’s the last of it, boss,” said Fangs. Behind him, Sweet Pea nodded. 

“Great,” Jughead said. The late October sun was just beginning to slip over the horizon. “You two can head out. I’ll see you tomorrow.” 

“Not coming with?” 

“I’ve got a couple more things to finish up here.” 

Betty could tell he was trying to sound noncommittal. Betty thought he was failing miserably. 

“Ms. Cooper, if you’re ready to do the last walk-through?” 

She nodded, and they went inside. 

Although the door was closed and locked behind them, and although Fangs and Sweet Pea clearly knew what was going on, they waited until the truck had disappeared behind the first curve of Betty’s long, winding driveway before they raced up the brand-new staircase. 

“Stairs still working?” Jughead panted as he took the steps two at a time, his steel-toed work boots clomping so loudly that they echoed, despite their rubber soles. 

Betty took the stairs one at a time. “Yes,” she said, already breathless. “But I’ve been having a problem in the bedroom.” 

“Do tell.” 

They reached the top of the stairs, and Jughead grabbed her around the waist, easily lifting her from the floor. All those years she’d wasted dating the intellectually fit but physically unfit, she thought. Manual laborers were the way to go. 

Or, they were the way to go if they were secretly intellectuals whose ideas of pillow talk included detailed recaps of crime podcasts that she might find inspirational. 

“I think I need you to do a little more work in there,” she gasped. 

“Just a little?” 

“Maybe a lot,” she conceded. “A never-ending renovation. Which I guess I pretty much had.” 

Jughead tossed her playfully onto her covers, stripped off his tank top, and paused, scowling at her in faux-annoyance. “You loved every minute of it.” 

“I did _not_ ,” she countered. “What about those two weeks my oven didn’t work?” 

“That was fine. Kept you from baking me a birthday cake.” 

“ _Jughead_.” 

Boots off, Jughead joined her on the mattress. “For what it’s worth, Ms. Coopersmith, I’m really proud of how these renovations turned out. I think they’re some of my best work.” 

Betty shook her head. 

“I think your best work is yet to come,” she said. 

He kissed her long and hard.

"I think _you're_ yet to come," Jughead whispered in her ear, and Betty laughed. 

  
  
  
  


Outside, the family of raccoons stood together, contemplating the half-empty Pop's takeout bags inside Betty’s trash cans.

  
  
  
  


(fin)


End file.
